Ok, I just spent the last 5-6 hours playing the Beta. I'm not sure if there's much I can talk about that hasn't already been discussed (due to the NDA), but I'd like to give my opinion on some of the things that have been mentioned.

First of all, let me set your minds at ease regarding the music. It's good. Not Gothic good, but close enough. If I didn't know otherwise, I would have thought it was Kai Rosenkranz again. It fits the setting perfectly (imo) in the same way Kai's tracks did in Risen.

Regarding the camera: I was extremely pissed off for the first hour or so. I was accustomed to the locked viewpoint of the "chase cam" used in all of PB's previous games. That said, it's not *that* bad, and I didn't encounter any of the lag that I've seen others complain about. In fact, I found the default sensitivity setting to be much too twitchy on my system, but it was fine once I reduced the mouse speed. I hope PB includes an option to lock the camera behind the player in the final version, but I can live with it the way it is.

I played @1920x1200 with everything maxed except shadows. With those setting it ran smooth enough on my GeForce GTX 470. I wasn't blown away by the visuals, but the graphics have never been the most important thing to me in PB's games. I consider them only a minor upgrade over Risen, but that's fine with me.

Originally Posted by JonNik
A question for the Beta players: was the really distracting popin of items/foliage seen in some videos already fixed in the "Beta" ?

If there was any significant pop-in, I didn't notice it.

Due to not having developed deeply into any skill trees, I'm not really sure how to judge the combat. It definitely feels a lot more "hacky slashy" than Gothic 1&2 or Risen, but hopefully that changes once you start to develop more skills. I will say this: combat against non-human opponents in the Beta was nothing more than spamming clicks for me. It wasn't as bad as Gothic 3, but it didn't seem much better either. I didn't acquire a firearm or voodoo in the Beta, so I can't comment on either of those aspects.

The Beta allowed me to choose from Easy, Normal, or Hard difficulty levels. I went with Hard, and I'm happy to announce that I had my ass handed to me on multiple occasions. I had to exploit my companion to win a lot of battles.

Which leads me to mention that my companion did not take damage in the Beta. I pray that's not the case in the final release, but something tells me it won't be. (I have to be careful here because I'm not sure exactly how specific I'm allowed to be on these aspects)

I didn't encounter anything that I'd consider a "glitch". Although I was a bit annoyed that the Beta simply kicked me back to the main menu if I went past certain boundaries, and there was no type of warning. Walking into deep water resulted in me being teleported back to land, but I don't expect that to happen in the release version.

Anyways… it's definitely a Day 1 purchase for me. Despite a few things I found annoying, the PB magic is still there.

Originally Posted by Moriendor
once Caldera was left behind and once the game opened up a little on Takarigua, the game grew on me and the good old, unique PB style began to shine through.